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By Daniella Gray
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Gwen Stefani thought she was too old to have another baby.
The 56-year-old pop-star recently said she was "desperate" to expand her family in her early 40s but believed it simply wasn’t possible.
"I really wanted to have another baby. I really did. And I couldn’t—and I was old," she said on a podcast episode of Hallow, adding that she even told her eldest son, "I’m sorry, your mommy’s too old to have a baby now."
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But at 44, Stefani gave birth to her third son, Apollo, with ex-husband Gavin Rossdale, later calling the pregnancy a "miracle."
Just weeks earlier, actress Claire Danes also prompted a similar wave of online reaction after revealing she went into a "meltdown" when she discovered she was pregnant with her third child at 44.
Danes, who had needed two rounds of IVF to conceive her second son, said she assumed the odds of a natural pregnancy at that age were "less than one percent."
So how realistic is pregnancy in your 40s, and are the odds always as bleak as they’re often portrayed?
In the U.S., mothers over 40 are now one of the fastest-growing groups of parents. For the first time in history, births to women aged 40 and older have overtaken teenage births, according to national statistics.
While overall fertility rates have declined, the proportion of births among women in their 40s has risen sharply over the past three decades.
Medically, the challenge is real. According to Dr. Armando Hernandez-Rey MD, a board-certified reproductive endocrinology and infertility specialist at Conceptions Florida (conceptionsflorida.com), pregnancy in your 40s is possible, but biology matters.
"Fertility naturally declines with age because both the number and quality of eggs decrease over time," he told Newsweek. "For women between 40 and 45, the chance of conceiving naturally in any given month is typically estimated to be around five to 10 percent."
Those numbers may sound daunting to those trying to conceive, but they don’t tell the full story.
"Over the course of a year, many women will still conceive naturally if they are ovulating regularly and have no other fertility issues," Hernandez-Rey explained. In other words, while it may take longer, pregnancy in the early-to-mid 40s is far from impossible.
When fertility treatment is needed, age-related differences become more pronounced. Hernandez-Rey pointed to data reported through the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) which shows that IVF live birth rates using a woman’s own eggs are generally around 20 to 25 percent per cycle for women ages 40 to 42, and roughly five to 10 percent for women ages 43 to 44.
Advances in reproductive medicine, however, continue to improve outcomes. Technologies such as genetic testing of embryos help identify embryos with the correct number of chromosomes, while highly controlled laboratory environments support healthier development.
Some clinics also use advanced air purification systems to reduce contaminants and optimize conditions for embryos.
While stories of celebrities having children in their 40s highlight that later-life pregnancy can and does happen, Hernandez-Rey said that fertility is highly individual: "The most important step for women considering pregnancy in their 40s is getting an early evaluation with a fertility specialist so they can understand their reproductive health and the options available to them."
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